Asura Genesis Xtreme 1TB NVMe SSD Review

Storage technology has changed over the years. Not only in capacities but in how your data is stored. I may be dating myself, but the first storage drive I possessed was an 80 MB (yes, megabyte) SCSI drive for my old Apple Macintosh LCIII. The next storage upgrade I bought at that time was a 500 MB external SCSI drive. Now, I know some people out there have worked with drives that were the size of refrigerators with way smaller capacities, but now things have gone the other way. Storage has gotten physically smaller; they have larger capacities and can also operate a lot faster. The two main types of storage these days are HDD (hard disk drive) and SSD (solid-state drive). Today, I will be looking at the Asura Genesis Xtreme 1TB NVMe SSD. Yes, a whopping one terabyte SSD capable of 3,500Mbps reads and 3,000Mbps writes.

Features and Specifications

Asura is a new name in the SSD market which is a California based company that was founded in 2018 with the mission of providing premium technology that is designed and engineered around quality, performance and reliability.

The Asura Genesis Xtreme is an M.2 2280 form factor NVMe (1.3) SSD that can support up to 3,500 MBps reads and 3,000 MBps writes in capacities ranging from 256GB up to and including 2TB. Being controlled by a Phison E12 (PS5012-E12) controller with Toshiba BICS3 TLC NAND Flash, the Genesis Xtreme is the new kid on the block. This is all backed up by a 7-year warranty.

What’s in the Box?

Talk about an original box. The box that the Asura Genesis Xtreme is one I have never seen before cubed shaped and easily slides apart to reveal the multiple layers. The one thing I will mention is that this Asura Genesis Xtreme SSD is an Engineering Sample. That means it might not be fully ready for the consumer and things may change in either hardware wise or physical design-wise once it has reached the masses. Though, it does look pretty cool.

Now because of this being an Engineering Sample, the contents may differ from a retail experience as well, but the inside contained the following items:

• Asura Genesis Xtreme 1TB SSD
• Marketing Informational Cards
• 3x USB 3.1 adapter cables (type-C, micro USB and Apple Lightning)

 

The Asura Genesis XTreme comes complete with a modular heatsink assembly. The top and bottom are of metal construction and make up the heatsink portion while the sides are the diffusers for the RGB LEDs that are present.

The bottom or backside of the Asura Genesis Xtreme SSD is adorned with the logo. Make a note of the two small screws which hold the assembly together.

Removing the two small screws allows you to remove the module heatsink and diffusers from the SSD itself. It did take a little bit of prying but it the assembly eventually popped off. Putting it back together was a bit trickier as the diffusers only fit on a specific side and certain way. The thermal tape helps transfer the heat to the metal plates.

Getting in closer to the Asura Genesis Xtreme SSD and you will see the Phison controller. The memory modules themselves are Toshiba 3D BiCS3 TLC NAND flash, 2 to each side of the PCB. Once formatted, the Asura Genesis Xtreme offers a total usable capacity of 954GB.

Installation and Setup

The Asura Genesis Xtreme is capable of making use of PCIe 3.0 4x, but in my test setup, it seems my AMD x370 based Dell motherboard only has the availability of PCIe 2.0 4x. This essentially means the performance of the Asura Genesis Xtreme will be half of what it is capable of. That’s okay though because the speeds that this M.2 NVMe SSD is still able to obtain, you can easily utilize it at a future date if one decides to upgrade the motherboard.

You would think installing an M.2 NVMe SSD into a computer would be pretty straight-forward right? Well, typically, it is. You locate an M.2 slot, stick it in, screw it down, and you’re done! Installing the Asura Genesis Xtreme into this Dell Inspiron 5675 was a bit trickier, as the location of the faster M.2 slot is right next to the RAM modules.

As you can see from the above photo, it was quite a tight fit with the heatsink installed. It is the design of this particular SSD with the LED diffusers that cause this slight issue. Other M.2 NVMe SSDs would probably fit okay, and if I kept just the heatsink on it as well, that would work too. I have noticed that other motherboard manufacturers also give a bit more room around their M.2 slots, but perhaps a motherboard with a built-in NVMe heatsink such as the ASUS PRIME X470-Pro would also have this type of issue and one would have to remove the Asura’s heatsink too.

Upon closer inspection, you can see that there is a fraction of the RAM clip stopping the Asura Genesis Xtreme from making contact with the mounting screw.

I had to remove the heatsink to get the SSD to make contact so that I could secure it with the screw. The drawback is that the LEDs are very bright and you don’t really get the most beautiful RGB effect without the diffuser. One might also assume the lack of heatsink on the NVMe SSD could also be a drawback.

RGB, yes the Asura Genesis Xtreme has 3 RGB LEDs that, by default, have a wave-type animation to them. People seem to be usually split between RGB as they either love it or hate it. Of course, with my Dell Inspiron which has no side window one cannot see the RGBness of the drive. Those who do have side window to their computer can make use of the RGB goodness, but to turn off or change the default pattern might not be something people can do. It is supposed to support Gigabyte’s Fusion, but without a Gigabyte motherboard, I was not able to verify it.

Benchmarking Setup

Now, with the Asura Genesis Xtreme installed, I was glad that the Dell BIOS was able to recognize it right away without having to do any updates. Windows, of course, was also able to recognize it right away as well. On to the benchmarks! This setup up isn’t a super high-end variety. Though for the price of the Inspiron 5675 it isn’t horrible either. It gets the job done, and I do enjoy gaming on it.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 1700x
• Motherboard: AMD x370-based Dell Motherboard
• RAM: G.SKILL FORTIS 16GB (2x 8GB DDR4-2400)
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 580

CrystalDiskMark

In terms of storage speeds and why it is worth upgrading to an NVMe SSD can be seen within the above CrystalDiskMark benchmark. The Dell Inspiron was originally shipped with a Toshiba 1TB 3.5-inch mechanical drive, but I wanted to install the OS on an SSD, so I went with (at the time) a Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD (SATA based). Upgrading from a mechanical drive to a solid-state drive was like night and day. But could one push that and go even faster? That’s where the Asura Genesis Xtreme comes into play. The Asura Genesis Xtreme, being an NVMe SSD, increased the speed performance by three times. The screenshot above from CrystalDiskMark shows a read of approximately 1,700MBps and writes of about 1,600 MBps. The Samsung EVO that I previously had was benched marked at approximately 500 MBps on reads and 400 MBps on writes.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

This is the first time I’ve personally have used ATTO Disk Benchmark, and I like how it displays the results. From the Bytes per second (top) screen, you can see how the speed increases nicely as the sample sizes grow in size. You do see similar results to that of CrystralDiskMark as the ATTO speeds reach towards the 1,700 MBps read and 1,500 MBps write speeds.

Final Thoughts

Even though I could not fully utilize the PCIe 3.0 4x speed of the Asura Genesis Xtreme 1 TB SSD, I did get a pretty impressive performance increases over the Samsung EVO 850 SSD I was previously using. If I were to update the motherboard one day to one that did support an NVMe slot with PCIe 3.0 4x support, then I would fully unlock the power that this SSD can handle. Granted, if you are using a newer motherboard, then chances you will have full PCIe 3.0 4x support for these types of NVMe SSDs out on the market.

Those who love to RGB everything in their PC would likely lean towards the Asura Genesis Xtreme. It already has excellent performance, but add the RGB on top of that, and it will be a hit with gamers for sure. If you can address the RGB with something like Gigabyte’s Fusion, then you can tailor the RGB in a way that suits your setup! Win-win all over, right?

If you are in the market for a 1TB high performing NVMe SSD, then I would recommend checking out the Asura Genesis Xtreme.